Local Search web service

All these cool pieces of AJAX code are great but what if you want to use them from some server-side code? Local Search doesn’t provide any kind of web service API as far as I’m aware, but all AJAX calls eventually have to resolve down to simple HTTP calls. So it should be possible to use them from a server-side piece of code. To test out this theory, I thought I’d see if I could write some C# code to use Google’s Local Search AJAX API to get the latitude and longitude for a postcode as if it was a web service call.

So to see what is happening under the hood, we need to fire up Fiddler and use a page that uses the Local Search API, like this one. If we issue a query using that page, we can see the URL used is something like this.

http://www.google.com/uds/GlocalSearch?callback=google.search.LocalSearch.RawCompletion&context=0&lstkp=0&rsz=small&hl=en-GB&gss=.uk&sig=b211652959f1f93330a3286c1a81eab6&q=KT1%203EG%2C%20UK&sll=37.77916,-122.42009&gll=37747397,-122451853,37810922,-122388328&llsep=500,500&key=ABQIAAAAjtZCgAx5i04BiZDO6HlxhRQUdBDpWCOMRMbgTcqadX0jQ8HOERSxXxhk24TIBUpivovAKLrnpSio9w&v=1.0&nocache=1246220526894

And the returned data is in JSON format. Click on that link in a browser and you should see the returned JSON data. And if we move to the .NET world and make the call from C#, like this

      HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(
        "http://www.google.com/uds/GlocalSearch?callback=google.search.LocalSearch.RawCompletion&context=0&lstkp=0&rsz=small&hl=en-GB&gss=.uk&sig=b211652959f1f93330a3286c1a81eab6&q=KT1%203EG%2C%20UK&sll=37.77916,-122.42009&gll=37747397,-122451853,37810922,-122388328&llsep=500,500&key=ABQIAAAAjtZCgAx5i04BiZDO6HlxhRQUdBDpWCOMRMbgTcqadX0jQ8HOERSxXxhk24TIBUpivovAKLrnpSio9w&v=1.0&nocache=1246220526894");
      WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse();
      Stream respStream = resp.GetResponseStream();
      StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(respStream);
      string response = reader.ReadToEnd();
      MessageBox.Show(response);

This works as well. Which is good since it suggests Google aren’t doing anything to stop people using the API from ‘browsers’ that aren’t really browsers. So the next thing to figure out is which bits of the URL are required. So after removing all the parameters that aren’t needed, we are left with

http://www.google.com/uds/GlocalSearch?q=KT1%203EG%2C%20UK&v=1.0

I was somewhat surprised at how few of the parameters are actually required for the call to still work. Even the user’s API key isn’t needed. Of course, since this is completely undocumented, this may change in the future. In fact last time I tried to do this, I’m fairly certain it was a lot harder to get the HTTP call to work from .NET.

So now we know what URL is required, we just need to be able to parse the returned JSON data into something more .NET friendly. Fortunately .NET 3.5 provides the JavaScriptSerializer class to serialize and deserialize JSON strings. So putting it all together, we get a fairly simple implementation

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

namespace LocalSearch
{
  public static class Postcode
  {
    public static void Geocode(string postcode, out double latitude, out double longitude)
    {
      HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(
        string.Format("http://www.google.com/uds/GlocalSearch?q={0}%2C%20UK&v=1.0", postcode));
      using (WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse())
      using (Stream respStream = resp.GetResponseStream())
      using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(respStream))
      {
        string response = reader.ReadToEnd();
        JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
        Dictionary<string, object> deserialized = 
          (Dictionary<string, object>)serializer.DeserializeObject(response);
        Dictionary<string, object> responseData =
          (Dictionary<string, object>)deserialized["responseData"];
        object[] results = (object[])responseData["results"];
        Dictionary<string, object> resultsData =
          (Dictionary<string, object>)results[0];

        latitude = Convert.ToDouble(resultsData["lat"]);
        longitude = Convert.ToDouble(resultsData["lng"]);
      }
    }
  }
}

This could be improved by using Deserialize<T> instead of DeserializeObject but that would involve writing some classes to hold the returned JSON data I think. I might look at that some other time.

Of course this provides exactly the same functionality as my StreetMap screen scraping code of many moons ago, so what’s the point? Really just to show a fairly generic method of using AJAX calls from .NET server-side code.